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Beyond search, Google Wallet may challenge PayPal

Sid Yadiv over at The Daily Rundown just wrote about rumors that Google is going to start on online payment service that will function as an alternative to PayPal. For anyone who has not used it, PayPal is owned by EBay and really is very reliable and trustworthy. It's also very easy. It takes less than 5 minutes to get a PayPal account. It's worth doing.

If you dislike Google's search hegemony (I know I do some times) you might enjoy Clusty, A9.com and Jux2 for searches. All produce very good results, as well as offering cool features that Google doesn't have.

Most interesting is his call for cooperation between Google and PayPal. Collaboration between services should happen far more often than it does. It's a real pain to use different Instant Messaging services, and I really wish there was more collaboration across tagging and social bookmarking systems. Can you imagine how horrid it would be if you couldn't email people who were using a different email service than you? I don't know why competitor cooperation is so rare still online, other than that companies are still stuck in an old paradigm of trying to lock users in to their service alone. It's ugly, and hopefully it's a paradigm that is dying in favor of services competing based on their relative merits.

Related: Don't miss the short film Epic 2015, a funny but informative guess into the future of Google and the web in general.